Guilty Thing (49 page)

Meanwhile, it was Dorothy who once more took care of Margaret and the children. ‘
Mrs De Quincey seemed on the whole
in good spirits,' she reported to De Quincey, ‘but with something of sadness in her manner, she told me you were not likely very soon to be at home.' Why did he not move his family to Edinburgh, Dorothy quite reasonably asked, where ‘lodgings are cheap' and ‘provisions and coals not dear'? This is where the remaining correspondence between De Quincey and Dorothy Wordsworth comes to an end.

A
Blackwood's
article, explained Edgar Allan Poe in ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article', should be written in the ‘
tone laconic
, or
curt
'. It ‘can't be too brief. Can't be too snappish. Always a full stop. And never a paragraph.' Or else it should be written in the ‘
tone elevated, diffusive, and interjectional
' where the ‘words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning'. On the other hand, ‘the
tone metaphysical
is also a good one. If you know any big words this is your chance for them.' De Quincey, who could do any of these tones, had sent Blackwood his account of the murder of William Coenen by Peter Anthony Fonk. Neither snappish, whirling or metaphysical, the article did not appear and from now on, De Quincey employed for
Blackwood's
the tone ironic. ‘
Pleasant it is, no doubt
, to drink tea with your sweetheart,' he wrote in a review of Robert Gillie's
German Stories
, ‘but most disagreeable to find her bubbling in the tea urn.'

John Wilson also had an essay spiked by
Blackwood's
. During the summer of 1823, he prepared a piece called ‘Murderers', whose subject matter remains unknown. ‘I am not very sure,' Blackwood responded, ‘if
these horrid details
are the kind of reading that the general readers of “Maga” would like to have.'
Blackwood's
were currently running a more elevated series called ‘Lectures on the Fine Arts'. De Quincey, still living under Wilson's roof, now interwove murder with the fine arts to produce his mock lecture ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts', which appeared in
Blackwood's
in February 1827. The lecture is framed by a letter ‘To the Editor of
Blackwood's Magazine
' from ‘XYZ' (one of De Quincey's
noms de plume
) informing him of a ‘Society of Connoisseurs in Murder' in which murders are evaluated like works of art. As evidence of this unholy assemblage, XYZ enclosed for publication the purloined script of ‘The Williams Lecture on Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts'. The author of the paper is the chair of the society, a position previously held by John Thurtell.

‘Something more,' the lecturer insists, denouncing the talents of Thurtell (whose ‘principal performance, as an artist, has been much overrated'), ‘goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed – a knife – a purse – and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensible to attempts of this nature.' The master of the art was, of course, John Williams, who raised murder to ‘a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr Wordsworth observes, has in a manner “
created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed
”'. The reference is from Wordsworth's 1815 ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads
': ‘Every author, as far as he is great and at the same time
original
, has had the task of
creating
the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.'

Coleridge also got his dues: the pleasure of a good murder, the lecturer suggests, is akin to the pleasure we get from other catastrophes. Years before, he remembered, during an evening spent around the tea urn with Coleridge in Berners Street, their talk was interrupted by cries of
‘Fire! Fire!'
and the party rushed into Oxford Street to find a piano factory in flames. ‘As it promised to be a conflagration of merit,' the lecturer regretted being unable to stay until the blaze reached its crisis. He later enquired of Coleridge ‘how that very promising exhibition had terminated. “Oh, sir,” said he, “it turned out so ill, that we damned it unanimously.”' Coleridge, ‘too fat to be a person of active virtue' but nonetheless a ‘worthy Christian', had left his tea and talk, it transpired, for nothing.

After guiding the reader through ‘
the great gallery of murder
' from ‘Cain to Mr Thurtell', the lecturer considered the question of murdered philosophers. ‘It is a fact, that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has been either murdered, or, at the least, been very near it.' The excursus on the connections between philosophy and murder was chiefly, he confessed, a means ‘of showing my own learning'. While Descartes was ‘all
but
murdered', Spinoza died in suspicious circumstances – ‘how was it possible that he should die a natural death at forty-four?' – while Hobbes, ‘on what principle I could never understand, was not murdered'. Malebranche was murdered by Bishop Berkeley, Leibniz died from the fear of being murdered, and Kant had a narrow escape on a journey, the murderer preferring to kill ‘a little child, whom he saw playing on the road, to the old transcendentalist'. The fate of the present incumbent of Edinburgh University's chair of moral philosophy was not discussed.

Thus the lecturer arrived at the Augustan age of murder, spanning the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This included the cases of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, Sir Theophilus Boughton, and Mrs Ruscombe of Bristol, murdered in her College Green bedroom by Highwayman Higgins, the man whose skeleton De Quincey knew so well. While the merits of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, ‘the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that were ever committed', are deserving of a lecture in themselves, ‘or even an entire course of lectures', the lecturer remained unimpressed by the Radlett murders: ‘as to Mr Thurtell's case, I know not what to say'. Along with the rest of the populace, he had been ‘carried away' with ‘enthusiasm' about the dispatch of William Weare, a murder which occasioned ‘the fullest meeting of amateurs that I have ever known since the days of Williams'. Out of their beds crawled the connoisseurs, ‘on every side you saw people shaking their heads, congratulating each other, and forming dinner-parties for the evening'. But the truth, as one of their more respected members complained, is that there ‘was not an original idea in the whole piece'. Thurtell's style was ‘as hard as Albrecht Dürer, and as coarse as Fuseli'. The murder of Weare was ‘
mere plagiarism
'.

Riding one day in Munich, the lecturer continued, he ran into a distinguished amateur of the society who had left British shores in order to ‘practise a little professionally'. His debut, this amateur informed him, had recently taken place at Mannheim where his lodgings faced those of an overweight baker whose ‘vast surface of throat' he fancied. One evening, after the baker had shut up shop, the amateur ‘bolted in after him', ‘locked the door' and, addressing him with ‘great suavity, acquainted him with the nature of my errand'. Drawing out his tools, the murderer was ‘proceeding to operate' when the baker, throwing himself into a boxing attitude, proudly announced that he ‘would not be murdered'. Their fight began. ‘For the first thirteen rounds, the baker positively had the advantage'; by round nineteenth, he ‘came up piping'. By the twenty-seventh round, the baker had become ‘
a log on the floor
' and the murderer was able, at last, to complete his task. The brave Baker of Mannheim, De Quincey's finest fictional creation, fixed himself in his author's imagination.

The lecture concluded with three rules to ensure an aesthetically satisfying murder. Firstly, the victim must be a good man, for ‘how can there be any pity for one tiger destroyed by another tiger?' Secondly, he must be a private figure because public figures, such as the Pope, are seen as ‘abstract ideas' rather than flesh and blood. Thirdly, he must be young enough to not yet be dyspeptic. While ‘severe good taste' would demand that the victim leaves behind a family of dependants, ‘I would not insist too keenly on this condition.'

‘On Murder' was a rich brew. Edward Herbert's – ‘Tims' – account of Thurtell as a ‘great actor' was a main ingredient, but De Quincey added to the pot a sprinkling of Coleridge's lectures on the fine arts, Burke's theory of the sublime, and the current craze for brotherhoods and clubs. The boxing match between the amateur and the Mannheim baker was a parody of Hazlitt's 1822 essay, ‘The Fight', and in the Society of Connoisseurs of Murder we see a version of the Blackwoodsmen in Ambrose's Tavern. The murderer's pleasure in his task recalls that described by Wilson in his
Blackwood's
story, ‘Extracts from Gosschen's Diary', and De Quincey's tone throughout is in tune with the ‘Noctes' celebration of the ‘genius' apparent in the current variety of murder methods. He was also parodying his own persona: the man who hailed opium as the hero of his tale now proclaimed the murderer to be an artist. Ticking all the boxes, De Quincey had demonstrated How to Write a Blackwood Article.

But there was more to the conception of this essay than parody and imitation. There was design, grouping, light and shade: De Quincey had opened the door to a room in his own mind. The artist as murderer was a seed first sown by Richard Savage and confirmed by Thomas Wainewright, but the target here was Wordsworth. Suggesting that the Ratcliffe Highway murderer had created the taste by which he was enjoyed, De Quincey inoculated John Williams onto William Wordsworth:
the murderer was a poet, the poet was a murderer
.

Between now and 1830, De Quincey shuttled to and fro between Edinburgh and Grasmere. In November 1827 his exhausted wife gave birth to her sixth child, a daughter called Florence, and the two eldest children, William, aged eleven and Margaret Thomasina, nine, moved to Edinburgh to be educated by their father. That same month, in Tanner's Close in the city's Old Town, an army pensioner died in the home of an Irishman called William Hare. With the help of his friend, William Burke, Hare removed the fresh corpse from the coffin (replacing it with wood) and sold it for seven shillings to a professor of anatomy called Robert Knox, who used the body for dissection. When Hare's lodger fell ill a few days later, he and Burke helped him on his way by holding his nose and covering his mouth. Because there were no incriminating marks, the victim appeared to have died of natural causes and Burke and Hare again sold his carcass to Knox. They had stumbled upon a foolproof murder method: those people deemed worthless in their lifetime were of value after death. Burke and Hare similarly dispatched fifteen further Edinburgh citizens, inviting the victims into their homes, giving them enough alcohol to pass out, and then smothering them. The stream of bodies was delivered in tea chests to an apparently unsuspecting Knox. The ruse was not apprehended until November 1827, at which point Knox was presumed innocent, Hare turned King's evidence and went to Ireland, and Burke was condemned to death.

It was Wilson who wrote about Burke and Hare for
Maga
, inserting them into the ‘Noctes' in March 1829. Having visited Hare in his cell, Christopher North apparently found him ‘
Impenitent as a snake
 – remorseless as a tiger'. Was he, asked the Shepherd, ‘a strang Deevil Incarnate?'

Naebody believes in ghosts in touns, but every body believes in ghosts in the kintra. Let either Hare or Knox sleep a' night in a lanely wood, wi' the wund roaring in the tap branches o' the pines, and cheepin' in the side anes, and by skreich o' day he will be seen flying' wi' his hair on end, and his een jumpin' out o' their sockets, doon into the nearest toon, pursued, as he thinks, by saxteen ghaists a' in a row. . . demandin' back their ain atomies.